Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: System Matters
System refers to any and all interactions which result in play, as a dynamic and changing form of fiction. These posts address its features at any scale or purpose of play.
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Games & Systems: My Thoughts
I worked my way through both the post by (on) Liber Ludorum and the original post by Linda Codega, both of which I have linked. Codega’s post is on Gizmodo and by definition is more focused / influenced / to be read in as commentary on more commercial ventures. Whereas LL’s post moves further afield…
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Calling Rolls and “Unresolving” statements
So, while getting feedback for my “Poolpendium”, I have recently discovered that a specific way I play “The Pool” is not that common among other people as I had originally thought. When I’m GMing, I’ll sometimes give bad or undesirable outcomes to see if the player is willing to roll for it, sometimes reminding them…
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We Both Fail
This weekend I started a one-on-one Dirty World game with Robbie. Dirty World is a noir mystery/crime thriller game using an unusual variation of the One Roll Engine (ORE) created by Greg Stolze. I happen to like ORE quite a bit having played both Wild Talents and The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor previously. The…
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Insight from Play
James Nostack asked some questions on the Discord about Mouse Guard. I ran a fairly lengthy campaign about 5 years back, I figured I would share my insights. The questions are copied from the discord, and reformatted for ease of reading. James_Nostack: Mouse Guard is loosely based on Burning Wheel. In that game, there’s a…
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No easy task
Both Knave and Tunnels and trolls share a couple of properties: crawl games, fairly cartoony encumbrance (though in different ways) and a dicing system with a fairly difficult baseline difficulty. I want to talk about the task resolution. (Practically every game resolves tasks and conflicts in some way; these ones resolve tasks explicitly and conflicts…
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The bouncing function of Sorcerer’s diagram
Ron’s Numeracy course puts an important focus on the fact that: RPG is about bounce, which means that the collective reincorporation of fictional elements provided by each person of the table creates fictional content that no single one of those people anticipated. Bounce starts with the intersection of the four authorities. Stochastic procedures only reinforce…
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Climbing out of the Pool after 18 sessions
We finished our game of the Pool set in an alternate magical/fantasy Napoleonic era India/Afghanistan. We played 18 sessions. The final confrontation saw Brigadier General Jean-Jacqyes d’Espoir defy his superior (Lord Lumley, Albion’s Governor General of their Mountain Kingdom colony; also the husband of Espoir’s unrequited love interest) and attack Shah Durani, a diabolist and…
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A People’s History, or at least a person’s
A lot of interviews showed up recently. For this one, I was contacted by Nune, who is studying entrepeneurship in Rotterdam. (rhymes with “rune,” one syllable) His questions included what does it mean to be a role-playing publisher, what do you have to contend with, what should you consider, and especially, the term he used,…
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Chase Mechanics in CORE
In last night's CORE session, three reality-sliders tumbled through four scenarios:– Resurrect Frankenstein's Monster & teach him love– Camel race to save the baby Jesus– National dance competition vs Evil– Car chase thru 1972 farmers market to deliver Pulsing Tesseract to The Spindle All these settings were mere justifications for me to playtest a few…